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How does Packet compare to Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean offers VM instances ("droplets") to users on an hourly or monthly basis. Almost every developer we know (including us!) has spun up something at Digital Ocean. Why? Well, it is very easy to use, it is inexpensive for small deployments, and they have super clear pricing.

What We Have in Common
Packet and Digital Ocean both share a deep passion for customer experience and are both based in the Big Apple - NYC! We both offer clear pricing with a focus on hourly usage.

We also both look for ways to bring leading edge technologies (like CoreOS and Mesosphere) to users and feature deployments that are quite a bit faster than the competition: a droplet provisions in about a minute, and servers at Packet in about five minutes.

How We Differ
The biggest difference between Packet and Digital Ocean is that "DO" exclusively offers VM-powered instances, while Packet delivers bare metal instances. At Packet, you don't have any shared resources: no shared disk, RAM, etc. You get the full server without any noisy neighbors or resource contention issues.

Digital Ocean burst on the scene in 2011 on the heels of its SSD-only drives. Packet's three configs also incorporate SSD drives, but we use only premium grade hardware for superior read/write performance. A great example is our Type 3 server, which features the next leap in storage performance (PCI NVMe drives) - offering 6-10x the performance of even the best SSD drives on the market.

Another notable difference is that Packet exposes core network functionality to our end users, including the support for custom ASN announcements (bring your own IPs) and elastic IP addresses.

Feature Run-Down
Check out Packet and Digital Ocean compare to each other: